Next Step with Shirin Oreizy | E246

Bringing behavioural science to startups.

On today's Fintech Impact episode, Jason Pereira will talk to Shirin Oreizy. Founder and CEO of Next Step, an award-winning Behavioral Design Agency with offices in San Francisco, CA & Boston, MA. Next step is a company that advises FinTech on how to incorporate behavioral science into product development and marketing to be more effective.

Episode Highlights

  • 1.00: Next step is a behavioral design agency because we sit at this intersection of leverage and behavioral science and how we help our clients design and their marketing and product experiences for their clients and ultimately, we are trying to help them better understand how people are really making decisions about the brand or so that they can ultimately drive better engagement or adoption for their products and solutions, says Shirin. 

  • 3.01: Shirin explains what behavioral science is. It's the study of how people really make decisions. We put the emphasis on the word really because there is another field of study called economics that we all have heard about that also looks at decision making. And why that's important, especially in the context of how we market our products is that in traditional economics we largely assume that the humans that we are dealing with on the other side are always rational. But as behavioral scientists we say while people can be rational, oftentimes they are not and there are other factors that affect their decisions, like peoples emotion, their environment (physical or digital) and social factors.

  • 5.47: Typically, when we work with startups, we are helping them create lifts anywhere from 30% to 300%, says Shirin. 

  • 7.35: Shirin explains that she is helping startups who have found early product market fit and now need help scaling or if they’ve plattued and need to get unstuck.

  • 09.22: Shirin talks about the process that her company follows how they do and audit and determine the challenge faced by a startup. During the audit Shirin's company determines how the startup is currently marketing, how their product is, what their competitors are doing and what are all the behavioral science opportunities that they are not doing.

  • 10.39: What we are really trying to do is figure out these different behavioral science  principles, which one of them has legs to it? Which one of them do we think is going to work for you and your situation? explains Shirin

  • 14.04: As per Shirin, what really may be differentiated about what we do in our testing relative to like just standard AB testing is when you do that standard AB testing and you find out that shade of blue works better than the shade of green for your buttons that just allows you to optimize only that interface but in contrast with behavioral science, basically what we are testing is different. We are testing for how and why people are making decisions about your brand and our learnings are portable in nature.

  • 16.02: Shirin says in the Fintech industry we see a lot of the same common challenges and the same common fixes. 

  • 19.34: Shirin says that as humans we have evolved to remember stories. We haven't evolved to remember random facts and figures and features. 

  • 19.35: A common thing that we see in Fintech clients is that they get really good at getting people to adopt their core product and then inevitably they have to expand beyond that product. 

  • 22.08: Shirin explains that their goal is to determine where can we introduce these Behavioral Science based nudges in the marketing or product for the biggest impact relative to effort and how we can remove friction from the behavior we want users to take.

  • 23.25: Jason says that the first things he discovered when he got into his business were it's a lot harder to make people move in inch than you would ever think. 

  • 26.01: Another issue which is a common issue we see with most of our tech clients is what we call cognitive fluency challenge, which goes back to we don't know how to explain our solution clearly, so we introduce a ton of jargon, says Shirin. 

  • 29.01: There is a special offer for listeners of this podcast. Shirin has an offer limited to 3 startups per month where they will do a free behavioral science consult w their team. Listeners have to mention that they have heard about Next Steps that through FI podcasts and fill out their online form on https://hellonextstep.com/.

  • 30.53: Shirin had spent a bunch of cycles internally figuring out their own product market fit to understand what types of companies are going to be a fit for their Behavioral Science methodology.

3 Key Points

  1. Shirin explains why behavioral science is important for startups and how her Behavioral Design Agency is helping them? 

  2. Shirin explains how her company's starting point, or the testing is all principles and ideas that have already been proven out in research in academia. 

  3. Shirin and Jason talk about a few cases where Shirin's company helped startups increase their top funnel. 

Tweetable Quotes

  • "I was always looking to figure out how we can create a more data-driven way to help our clients with their marketing efforts and growth efforts." - Shirin Oreizy

  • "We have had a lot of great success working with technology companies, bringing it to life." - Shirin Oreizy

  • "It's about that person's individual journey that leads to their version of rational decisions." - Jason

  • "With what is happening with startups, so I think the first thing that we're seeing with our clients is that they need to scale smarter, which means largely they are working with smaller budgets, smaller teams." -  Shirin Oreizy

  • "My favorite part of doing this stuff is and this is actually a challenge that we see with our clients is that a lot of the times say the executive team has ideas around what's going to work." -  Shirin Oreizy

Resources Mentioned

Fintech ImpactJason PereiraFintech